


Two Peas In A Really Shitty Pod

by Nimravidae



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Car Accidents, Coping, Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-11-30
Packaged: 2018-02-27 13:00:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2693948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nimravidae/pseuds/Nimravidae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Latula gives some advice to Sollux about coping with the loss of a loved one. Especially when you feel like its your fault.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Peas In A Really Shitty Pod

Hovering in front of his door, Latula took a moment to contemplate what she would say. What she could she say?

It wasn’t his fault.

It was no one’s fault.

Don’t blame yourself.

Every other ounce of flack spoon-fed to the sixteen year old boy on the other side of the door? No, no way. That was so far from being the radical idea that lead her here, so far in-fucking-deed. Latula needed… something.

Sure Mr. and Mr. Captor (Or Mr. Cap-Squared) asked her to come, asked her if maybe she could help? After all, she’d sort of been through it before.  
Sort of. She could hear the implications in the first Mr. Captors (Or the Original Captor, really,) voice, pressing down on her as she agreed to come over, maybe pop in say hello and stumble a few words out before she started breaking down in front of no body. Sounded like a great idea until she was standing there. And her hand wasn’t shaking at all, no way, man! Pyrope’s hands don’t shake just because they’re about to go talk to someone! Not at all. No matter what the topic is!  
Maybe she should burst in? No. Bad idea.  
Knock? Better.  
  
One bare hand raised to tap lightly before she pulled it back. Take her sunglasses off?  
  
That was a good idea that could buy her at least two seconds. She made sure they were neatly tucked away in her bag before she… stopped once again. Hm. She swore she packed her phone. She had to, she was texting C-1 and C-2 on her way out the door. And she didn’t drive so it wasn’t like she could leave it in her car. A few words of un-cool origins tumbled from her lips and slid across the floor in a messy heap along with half the contains of her purse as those damn uncoordinated hands fucked up on a simple holding job and instead let it fall.  
  
“You know you don’t have to, Latula,” Came a quiet voice from behind her. It was so smooth and soft that she jumped, so not expecting that. She flashed a quick grin that didn’t reach her teal eyes before brushing back a strand of chemically-darkened hair.  
  
“It’s fine, C-1,” She said, her grin getting more strained, “If he needs someone to talk to I still think I’m his best option, ya’know?”  
  
C-1, or Paul Captor to pretty much everyone else, was the perfect image of his sons. Tall and almost un-naturally skinny with heterochromatic eyes peeking out from glasses he had to wear to see two feet in front of his face. Deep brown hair was almost nearly always a horrendous mess, but when the light hit it just right it tinged with the faintest touch of red, making it look almost like a rolling mess of smoking flames.  
  
Flames.  
  
Latula had to look away, back to the mess she shoved into her bag. Palm flat on the door she pulled herself back up to her feet, flashing an empty smile once again.  
“If, uh. If he wakes up while I’m in the pit let him know I’ll see him before I leave, okay?” She asked, trying to keep her plea for him to stop asking questions from showing in a too-plain light. But that seemed to be in vain as Paul caught on the words he was going to say and bowed his head instead.  
“Knock twice, it’ll put him in a better mood.” He said instead, two steps back and one corner later, the hallway was abandoned and Latula was alone in front of a well-marked and well-worn door.  
  
She knocked twice before opening the door slowly.  
  
The room was a mess, walls painted in lines of red and blue – at least she thought they were. They were lined with… things. Not just posters, no, but formulas and equations chalked against the very surface. Written out in a shitty chicken-scratch that rivaled Terezi’s and went down under and over again, ones and zeros and other codes just left to sit there and fade in the sunlight that was blocked by heavy black blinds. The floor was a web of wires and parts of computers and other electronics; it was a maze of games and technology. Something she thought she hadn’t seen since before The Incident.  
  
Pushed against the farthest wall was a messy twin bed, sheets and blankets kicked down and around with the source of the chaos sitting in the middle of the mess. The pillows were clearly busy as well, one was slumped against the opposite wall as if thrown in anguish, and the other was wrapped up in the arms of a gangly sixteen year old. One who hardly acknowledged her entrance.  
  
Huh.  
  
Latula expected a solid “fuck off,” or “go away.” But this was way more disturbing. 

“Sup, B-2?” She said, stepping in and shutting the door behind her. “I mean, I know what’s up so no need to toss that glare my way, bro. I get it ninety-nine percent of the time anyway. Just a sort of… yeah. Not gonna ask how your feeling either. I just wanna… talk.”  
  
He turned those stunningly blood-shot eyes away from her and fixated them on the wall instead. It was funny, in a way. He had the same eyes his father had, one a bright blue and the other a dark brown. She was always drawn to the brown before but the redness of his eyes drew attention to the other, making it seem brighter in comparison. It didn’t help that the brown one was slightly obscured by an un-changed bandage over his forehead.  
  
He should change that, she thought to herself as she took half a step forward before stopping, trying to summon up the courage to speak if now just to break the silence.  
As it would turn out, Sollux would do that for her instead. “Do you ever wish he just died instead?”  
  
Oh.  
  
For a moment, Latula contemplated lying. “Lying would be pretty uncool right now, I guess. So uh. Yeah. I did, I mean, I used to at least. Do you?”  
He made a soft noise before letting his chin rest on the bundled up pillow. She noted he was sitting cross-legged but his foot wouldn’t stop moving. He probably was a mixture of apathy and manic behavior, she picked up on that emotion in the years after The Incident.  
“Not because I don’t love him because damn, kid. I love him more than anything else.”  
  
“Still?”  
  
“Still.” She confirmed, a little more confidant in herself now. And she showed that by walking forward more, snagging the comfy looking desk chair and settling herself down in it cross-legged. “But it was like this. I didn’t want him to suffer, still don’t but I’m glad he’s here. Before I wished he died so people would stop thinking he was always like this. They stopped believing me when I tell them about how it used to be and then I wished he’d died back then so they could remember him being… him.”  
Sollux seemed to accept this but he didn’t speak again for a while. And neither did Latula. Which lead to once again, silence between the two. She wasn’t that great at this, really.  
  
“Lemme guess,” she started again as the clock on his laptop told her a solid five minutes had passed in silence, “you don’t know if you wished Aradia was alive still because you know there’s a chance she could be like Mituna and you don’t want that, and you feel guilty as all hell because you love ‘Tuna Fish too. But it’s def not a rad position to be in.”  
  
“I thought Terezi was the one in Psychology classes,” he muttered, to himself Latula figured. But she couldn’t help a laugh that bubbled up.  
  
It was a little funny, actually, “’Rez just wants to know how to fuck with people more. Ain’t nothing good about her goals. But she’s my baby sister so I gotta support her decisions, you know?”  
  
“Yeah.” Okay so maybe not as funny. She let her smile drop as she scrambled for something else to say but for the second time that night the younger boy beat her to the punch. “Are you here to say it’s not my fault? It was icy, it doesn’t usually snow this time of year, you couldn’t have known. You couldn’t have seen it coming. It was another car, not you.”  
  
Her eyes fell to the ground. It was marked with stains of black and little burns turning the carpeting bald in a few spots. “No. I’m not because it’s not your fault and nothing I’ve got to say is gonna change what you think, though. I know that because I know how you’re thinking.”  
  
“You weren’t even in the car, LT,” Sollux practically scoffed, a bitter noise that drew her to flinch slightly. But if he noticed he didn’t care.  
  
“But I should’ve been and I feel that guilt all the time, Sollux.” Full-names. Serious business. “I was supposed to be there with K-man and his kitty. And Mit always sits behind Kurloz when we’re both in the backseat so he can dig his knees into the back of his seat which means if I was in the car it would’ve been me instead, Sollux.”  
  
She didn’t know she was crying until the drops turned the knees of her jeans a slightly darker navy. Frustrated at the break in her mask, she rubbed at her eyes for a moment to re-gain her composure. For a moment between the blurs of water, she could’ve sworn the teenager looked guilty. But she couldn’t help herself. She had to finish. She had to choke down the waterworks and finish. “But I wasn’t and I can’t go back and fix this, Sollux. Just like you can’t fix this. I’m sorry, I know you loved her and I know how badly this hurts. I really do, it feels like nothing will ever be okay again and maybe it won’t. But… it’s not worth it not to try.”  
  
She was panting a bit, her chest rising and falling with muted and muffled sobs. She didn’t see or hear when Sollux slipped from his bed, his arms wrapping around the older woman. She clung to him like he was her lifeline, breaking down in the moment.  
  
They sat, crumbled to his floor that smelled like ash and electricity, in each other embrace for what felt like days. Months or years.  
  
Or hours.  
  
Her shoulder was damp and so was the front of his shirt but neither cried, at least not in their admittance.  
  
Mituna was still napping when she left so she wrote a blue and red crayon letter for Paul to read him later on that night and kissed his forehead and extra time so, on either side of his scars, he had two bright red lip marks.  
  
Paul hugged her, and so did dear old C-2, Lester.  
  
Latula walked home as the sun set, her fingers working over the screen of her phone for a moment. The second she tucked it away, it buzzed to life with a little jolt.  
“thank2 iit meant a lot twoday.”  
  
“No probl3m, m4n. W3 should do 1t 4ga1n som3t1m3!!”  
  
“2ure.”  
  
This time, the smile almost touched her eyes. Almost.


End file.
